About LucasFilm’s involvement with Atari:

 

LucasFilm is known worldwide for their Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, but many do not know of their incredible and lasting contribution to video games and video game technology.

 

In the early 80’s, Atari entered into a partnership/licensing deal with LucasFilm. The purpose of the agreement was to enable LucasFilm to bring some of their movies to the arcade: Star Wars / The Empire Strikes Back were vector-based and 1985’s Return of the Jedi was a raster-based isometric side-scroller. In addition, there was the popular Atari 2600 version of Indiana Jones.

 

While the LucasFilm license provided Atari with a few hot titles, Atari provided detailed specs and engineers on their home computer. At that time, it was the Atari 400/800 series.

 

George Lucas was fascinated with the prospect of producing interactive entertainment and commissioned LucasFilm Games to develop four games for the Atari home computer systems. There were initial technology demos. Some may have seen the demo that looked like Pong in 3D, to the backbeat of a four-part techno tune.

 

After basic game design was whiteboarded, the LucasFilm programming team approached the coding in a different way than had been previously done. For on thing, the games were developed on a mainframe system that emulated a 6502 (the Atari computer processor), rather than on the platform itself. This enabled the programmers to really optimize and debug code more effectively and assisted in the coding of the other 6502 platform versions (Commodore and Apple specifically). Once the core code was written, it was transferred over to the home computer where individualized graphic and sound treatments were put into place.

 

Rescue and Ballblazer were worked on simultaneously, with two teams sharing knowledge and code.

 

Rescue on Fractalus represented the pinnacle of software technology. While fractal geometry had been discovered in the early 1900’s, scientists could only explore it on paper until the 1970’s when fast computers started to appear. IBM made the first public graphic showings of the Mandelbrot set as early as 1971. Applications for this ‘chaos math’ started appearing later. In 1982, the movie, ‘Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan’ used fractal geometry to animate the ‘Genesis Planet’. It was one of the first times computer graphics had been used on screen, and the VERY first time for fractally generated terrain. These graphics had been generated on a (then) powerful mainframe in the computer division at LucasFilm’s Industrial Light and Magic studios.

 

The designers of Rescue were convinced that Fractal geometry would give them natural looking mountains to fly over, but it took them some time to simplify the code enough to run on a personal computer. Rescue on Fractalus was the first game to ever use fractal geometry for real-time terrain generation. The advantage over other systems was a truly 3D planet with unique mountain features in under 48K of RAM. Vector-based systems would have required too much processing power or RAM.

 

In the fall of 1983, Rescue on Fractalus and Ballblazer were released. There was some well-deserved fanfare, but it was a bad time for video games. The beginning of the video game crash had begun, and by the time Koronis Rift and The Eidolon were released (early 1984), Atari was against the ropes. They weren’t alone however, Texas Instruments would post losses that year of over 800 million dollars, Coleco would file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, and Mattel gave up on the Intellivision. To the true video game enthusiasts, this was disaster on an unparalleled scale. No one was completely sure that video games would continue, or in what form they would take if they did. The press hailed them as a ‘fad’, and there was nothing to refute that statement.

 

Indeed, the saddest injustice of this time was to have played any of Lucas’s games on an Atari. These were quite possibly the most advanced games of their day, specifically designed for the Atari home computer hardware, which was arguably the best hardware platform of the day.

 

While versions of these games did get released for the Commodore 64 and Apple II platforms, they paled in comparison to the Atari versions in almost every way. While it was usually easier to develop a game on the C-64 platform, there was no competition when compared to one specifically designed for the Atari. Atari clearly had the advantage with CPU speed (1.83 MHz for the Atari vs. 1.00 MHz for the C-64/Apple), and bitmap graphics. LucasFilm Games pushed Atari’s custom video modes to the utmost limits.